1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for classifying fingerprint image quality and a fingerprint image recognition system, and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for classifying fingerprint image quality, by which fingerprint image quality is classified using a trained quality classifier and feature information of a fingerprint image, thereby providing a reliable fingerprint image recognition system, and the fingerprint image recognition system using the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
Biometrics is technology of identifying an individual based on the fact that the subject person's physiological or behavioral features different from other persons'. In particular, a fingerprint image recognition system using a fingerprint image is mainly used in the field of biometrics due to accuracy, convenience, a light, thin, simple and small input device, and low cost. Fingerprint image recognition systems have advantages of economical installation cost and reliable security and have been verified with a unique inherent feature of a person based on world wide application cases for several hundred of years. Fingerprint image recognition systems can be made compact and thus provide high mobility and space usability. In particular, since interest in security and private life protection increases with the development of networks, fingerprint image recognition systems are being developed as attractive technology in the field of biometrics. In fingerprint image recognition systems, stability is required particularly in a procedure for registering a user's fingerprint image and is closely related with the performance of a feature information extraction algorithm for the fingerprint image, which is usually influenced by quality information of the fingerprint image very much. Accordingly, a method of accurately classifying the quality information of the fingerprint image will be helpful to find a method of improving the feature information extraction algorithm for the fingerprint image. As a result, the method of improving the feature information extraction algorithm will increase the performance of a fingerprint image recognition system.
However, since only one preprocessing operation is used in most of conventional procedures for extracting feature information from a fingerprint image, fingerprint image quality cannot be accurately classified in conventional technology.